EVENTS

And they lived happily ever after

Oh how sweet, Hamid Karzai has pardoned a woman who was serving a 12 year prison sentence for…arson? Armed robbery? GBH? No; for being raped. That’s what women who are raped get in Afghanistan (and not only there): they get long prison sentences, and that’s if they’re lucky; the less fortunate ones get stoned to death. Here’s why: it’s because a man was able to get access to the aperture between her legs, and allowing a man to get access to that is of course a horrendous crime. It’s no good calling it “rape”; it’s the woman’s job to make the aperture inaccessible, period; it’s not the man’s job to refrain from shoving his penis into it when he gets the chance.

But in this case it all works out, because Gulnaz, the woman in question, isn’t actually being set free (to go on making her aperture accessible to random men, the slut), she’s being let out of one prison so that she can enter another: marriage to the man who raped her.

Some 5,000 people signed a petition for Gulnaz’s release. News of her pardon came in a statement from the presidential palace.

It said a meeting of the judiciary committee had “discussed the issue of rape… and the issue of her imprisonment”.

“As the both sides [Gulnaz and the rapist] have agreed to get married to each other with conditions, respective authorities were tasked to take action upon it according to Islamic Shariah,” it said.

Darling Islamic Shariah, which hands a rape victim over to her rapist.

Comments

Hey, they’re just doing what the Bible says (don’t know if that particular reg got plagiarized into the Quran, but anyways good on ‘em for picking up on it). Not like those apostate American Republicans, who’ve forgotten where they came from….

Well, if CNN is to be believed, marriage is not a condition of her release. Her (unnamed) attorney says she has a safe place to go and doesn’t want to marry her attacker.

A word of warning: only read the comments at the link if you have a strong stomach regarding rape apologists. According to some of the commenters, it’s ok to put a woman in jail for 3 years for “fail[ing] to report her rape quickly enough” with additional justification being that her sentence was less than her rapist’s.

Ugh. I’m on the verge of saying “why did we bother overthrowing the Taliban again?” but I just read in The Economist that the number of kids in school has increased from 1.2 million under the Taliban to 8.2 million now, and the percentage of them who are girls has gone from 0 to 40%; the percentage of Afghans with access to basic health care has gone from 8% to 80%; 27% of members of the lower house of parliament are women, and the article quotes one woman (anonymously) as saying:

When the Taliban first took power, people didn’t really know what they were like. They do now and the women of Afghanistan will never forgive them.

But the rest of Afghan men evidently still have some lessons left to learn, and they’d damn well better learn them.

Eamon, the passage you are thinking of is Deutoronomy 22:28-29. “If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.”

With regard to legal systems that are anathema to civilised societies, there isn’t much between Sharia and Deuteronomic law.

What is bizarre about the women as property idea is, If your car get’s stolen, and you get it back, you don’t junk the car if all the thief did was take it for a ride*. Jailing or stoning rape victims seems ridiculous in that sense. Rather it is the woman’s body parts that are the property and she herself is responsible for securing them. The man get’s ownership of the parts, the woman just comes along as the caretaker. Religion and Islam specifically is a mental disease and should be eradicated.